Can we trust the accuracy of smartphone location services?

This study investigates the accuracy of location services within smartphones while exploring if the huge increase in the popularity of these services has led to an increase in accuracy over the years, as smartphone technology becomes more popular and more advanced. Beginning by investigating what exactly location services are and how they work, while looking at trends of use, in order to justify such a study a literature will be conducted to identify all relevant aspects of location services that need to be taken forward into the study. To conduct a fair and unbiased study previous studies and statistics will be used to compare against while also using similar methods of data collection, the geo-tagging of photos taken on a smartphone, in this case a Samsung Galaxy Note 4 running Android Kitkat 4.4.4. 200 data samples will be collected over various locations in the UK in order to gather a wide range of data while these will be collected in a ‘natural’ way to replicate the use of the everyday smartphone user and not a minority scrutinising accuracy which could lead to bias. The study found that the accuracy of the location services within smartphones is far from reliable with an average error reading of 93 metres of 200 data samples which far exceeds that of any previous studies. The study also finds that geo-tagged photos taken indoors have worse location accuracy than those taken outdoors with average error indoors being 113.35 metres and outdoors being 84.119 metres. Varying from the different locations of photographs the lowest recorded average error was found to be 14.973 metres while the highest was 529.48 metres. Data analysis also looked at the highest and lowest recorded errors over the 200 data samples in order to analyse the ‘precision vs. accuracy’ argument. The data from this argument showed that precision can occasionally be extremely accurate to within 1.3 metres however at the same time can also spike dramatically and place the user 4915 metres away from the actual location of the photo. The study concludes that location services within smartphones are generally unreliable and while offering excellent precision at times this is no replacement for accuracy and therefore these services cannot be relied upon. Finally the study also offers recommendations of future research into the accuracy of assisted GPS chips used in smartphones which could potentially lead to a switch back to standalone GPS